alt Hacker NewsBut also internal space is increasing cubically—so any reason it couldn’t have mutated to have 2 hearts servicing each side of the body?
You could also claim our bodies have massive surface area, molecularly speaking. We just are factory-configured to not sense things that are too small to matter to ourselves as a whole (like small bugs and below)
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Klingon whales, now?
There are measurements suited to purpose, then there are "technically you could do that" measurements, and it's the former we'd want to use when measuring what sorts of power and pressure and material properties of the vascular system and cardiac tissue of a whale. Enormous amounts of blood are being pumped around, and I'd have to imagine you're in the million miles of arteries and veins and capillaries ballpark, so there's a lot of pressure holding that mass back.
That'd be a fun model to figure out for a weekend project - what sorts of forces are we talking about - how efficient is it compared to say, a hummingbird, or a human, or an earthworm heart?
A binary vascular system? Do you want regenerating whales in the time vortex?
> any reason it couldn’t have mutated to have 2 hearts servicing each side of the body
There are probably no hard reasons. It is most likely that the path of incremental changes leading to that solution is either unlikely, or does not convey an advantage to propagation of genes.